


wherever we're standing

by shineyma



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Case Fic, F/M, Grant Ward Isn't Hydra, Post-Episode: s01e11 The Magical Place, Season/Series 01
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-26
Updated: 2017-12-26
Packaged: 2019-02-21 22:39:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13153506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shineyma/pseuds/shineyma
Summary: In retrospect, Jemma really might have been better off taking a vacation instead.





	wherever we're standing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jdphoenix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdphoenix/gifts).



> A (slightly belated because WRITING IS HARD) Christmas gift for the ever spectacular JD!! I love you lots and hope your Christmas was SPECTACULAR! Please forgive me for this mess of a fic <3

It seems like such a good idea at the time.

The team is grounded for the next two months while Coulson recovers from torture, Fitz has gone to visit his mum (“Be nice to see her in person one last time before we _die in the field_.”), and, after months of nonstop action, Jemma finds she’s not in any sort of hurry to return to her boring, predictable lab at the Academy. The offer of a secondment to Agent Caraway’s team feels like a godsend.

Three weeks later, locked in a cell with two unconscious SHIELD agents and a probably-broken wrist, she has a few regrets.

 

+++

 

Jared Thornton is a two-bit thief with an apartment just as small as his skillset. The too-big kitchen table that juts into the entryway, guaranteeing a bruised hip for any and every visitor he gets, is a pain in the ass, but it’s not a surprise for a shoebox in Manhattan. His visitors curse, roll their eyes, and forget about it. Just the typical too much stuff/not enough space arrangement to be expected of anyone who lives in New York and isn’t as rich as Tony Stark.

Nothing to get suspicious over, surely.

Of course, if Jared’s visitors knew that he was actually an undercover SHIELD agent, they might give that table a second look. They might realize that as a repurposed card table, it’s light enough to be moved out of place by the slightest bump. _Then_ they might notice that Jared’s always particularly careful to put it back in the exact same spot. From that, they _might_ extrapolate that the table is serving as the closest thing to an alarm as an undercover SHIELD agent can manage with a cover so inept and worthless…but probably not.

(Jared’s friends are just as dumb as he is.)

Point is, when Grant gets home from a long day of pretending to fail at pickpocketing, finding the table three-quarters of an inch out of place sends up an instant red flag. He slips silently past it, rounds the corner, and levels his gun on—

Felix Blake.

What the fuck.

Still, Grant’s got a cover to keep, and with the table out of place, there’s no telling whether a member of the cartel he’s trying to worm his way into might’ve swung by to plant bugs before Blake showed up.

So he keeps his gun up and makes sure it’s with Jared’s south Detroit accent that he demands, “Who the fuck are you and what the fuck do you want?”

“Forget the cover, Agent Ward,” Blake says coolly. “We’re pulling you out.”

On the one hand, Jared’s totally incompetent, and it’s been hurting Grant deep down in his _soul_ to be so bad at everything.

On the other, he’s spent nearly a full month pretending to be incompetent. He’s not crazy about letting that work go to waste.

But Blake used his name. If there are bugs, he’s screwed either way, and if there aren’t—

“Why?” he asks, tucking his gun back into his jeans. “Something happen?”

Blake grimaces. “You could say that.”

He holds out a tablet, barely missing smacking Grant in the chest with it. (It’s a really small apartment.)

(Grant nearly braining him with the thing when he accepts it is less about the close quarters and more about general frustration, but whatever. Not like Blake can prove anything.)

“We need you for a search and rescue,” Blake says. “We’ve got three agents missing in Cambodia.”

Grant doesn’t ask why him and not some other agent—an agent fluent in the local language, or an agent on the SR rotation, or an agent _not in the middle of another mission_.

He doesn’t _need_ to ask. The tablet in his hands says it all.

It’s open to a mission file—page one of only four. There’s a mission brief, some background, a couple of statistics…and a list of involved personnel.

The name _Simmons, Jemma_ blinks cheerfully up at him, outlined in purple to denote her MIA status.

Fuck.

 

+++

 

“Someone will come for us, won’t they?” Agent Willis asks on the third day. He’s sweating, sweltering in their stuffy cell and under the weight of his own panic.

“Of course,” Jemma says calmly. Her vision whites out every time she so much as twitches her wrist, but she’s found that if she lies very, very still, the stone floor offers enough pressure to ease the throbbing in her back. “Not to fret. We’ll be out of here in no time.”

She’s not thinking about South Ossetia, about Fitz and Ward sent in and left to die without warning. She’s not thinking about anything at all, save perhaps a freezing cold shower and an ice cream cone.

Agent Flores doesn’t say anything—but then, she’s been unconscious since their captors tossed her back into the cell some four hours ago. At least her head wound’s stopped bleeding.

“No time at all,” Jemma reiterates, and firmly thinks of nothing but snow.

 

+++

 

“You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.”

“Agent Ward—”

“ _Monkeys_?” Grant feels a little like he’s trapped in a horrible and very bizarre dream. “You endangered one of SHIELD’s brightest minds because you’re worried about _monkeys_?”

Caraway bristles. “The long-tailed macaque is a near-threatened—”

“Last time I checked, SHIELD wasn’t into wildlife conservation,” he snaps. “Especially not the kind that means defenseless science agents go wandering around the jungles of Cambodia without a damn escort!”

Amrani mutters something that might be agreement, and if Grant were any less angry, he might actually feel sorry for her. Trying to protect Coulson’s team is bad enough; he can’t imagine being team specialist for a lead agent who _actively sabotages_ any attempt at reasonable caution.

Unfortunately, he’s just a little too pissed for sympathy.

“There was no reason to suspect they would be in danger,” Caraway starts, all disdain and careless superiority like he didn’t _lose Simmons_ , and Grant’s about three seconds away from punching him in the face when the comms agent interrupts.

“Would you guys shut up?” he demands. “I can’t concentrate with all this shouting!”

Hopkins is trying to hack a network of wildlife cams. It’s their only hope of finding Simmons—more than a week since she went missing, any physical trail in the jungle will’ve long since disappeared, even if he _did_ have a last known location more specific than “somewhere outside”—and it’s a slim one at best.

It’s not helping his temper any to trust the job to an obvious amateur.

In fact…

“You know what, no,” he says, and pulls the laptop away from Hopkins. “Let’s leave this to the professionals.”

Hopkins goes bright red. “What, you’re some kind of super hacker, Agent _Neanderthal_?”

Grant holds his stare for a long minute—just long enough for that flush to drain away into something greenish and nervous instead—and then scoffs.

“No,” he says, pulling out his phone. “But it’s past time we called one in.”

“I am perfectly capable—”

“—Of turning on a computer, I’m sure,” Grant says over him, even as he pulls up his contact list. “That’s about all I’m willing to give you.” He’d be happy to expound on that, but the line connects before he gets the chance. “Skye?”

“Ugh, what,” she mumbles. A glance at his watch and some quick math tells him it’s three in the morning in LA; he probably woke her up. “What, is someone dying, someone _better_ be dying, Ward—”

“Not yet,” he says, grimly enough that she draws in a sharp breath.

“Gimme half a—” There’s a muffled clatter, a strange squeak, and then she’s back, sounding perfectly awake. “Okay, what’s going on?”

“Simmons decided to spend our break with another team,” he says, “and they lost her.”

“Wh— _how_?” she demands.

“They’re morons.”

“I see what they meant about his personality issues,” Amrani mutters to Hopkins. Grant ignores it.

“What can I do?” Skye asks. “Assuming you’ve got _taking care of the morons who lost Simmons_ covered?”

“I do,” he says. “We’re in Cambodia—Tonlé Sap Biosphere Reserve. There’s a network of wildlife cameras set up in Battambang; we need the footage from last Thursday.”

“Right, got it,” Skye says, and then, “Spell Battambang.”

He does, and waits while she does her thing. The sound of her rapid typing eases a little of the tension in his shoulders; it _shouldn’t_ , but he’s already had to face the fact that he’s grown so used to working with his team that he genuinely prefers it.

(Actually, he’s had to face it _three times_ —once when he went under as Jared without backup, something that shouldn’t have bothered him but really did, and twice since he arrived to discover how _stunningly useless_ Caraway is.)

“Uh,” Skye says eventually. “Battambang is…really big. There are a lot of cameras.”

“Filter out anything with a river view,” he orders. “She was in the jungle.”

Skye hums. “Still a lot of results, Ward.”

He was afraid of that.

 

+++

 

Jemma is a prisoner, but she is also a SHIELD agent. Just because she’s been beaten, locked in a cell, and denied even the mildest sort of painkillers is no reason not to do her job. (And in any case, sitting around doing nothing but think about their dire circumstances seems a clear path to insanity.)

So, despite the horrible circumstances she’s found herself in—and the very unhelpful whimpering from Agent Willis—she’s kept working at the puzzle that brought them here in the first place.

She thinks she has it just about figured out.

It was monkeys that drew Agent Caraway’s attention. Specifically, long-tailed macaques: _Macaca fascicularis_ , also known as the crab-eating macaque. They’ve been turning up dead of mysterious causes in Cambodia’s Battambang province for the last six months—killed by neither predators nor poachers, but some form of illness Jemma (when presented with samples for study) couldn’t identify.

Jemma was already familiar with this breed of primate prior to the mission, and not because of Fitz’s monkey obsession. She knows them better as cynomolgus monkeys—frequent subjects of medical experimentation, thanks to their many genetic similarities to _Homo sapiens_. She’s never taken part in such experiments herself, but they were naturally a part of her biochemistry courses, and she has an excellent memory.

The familiarity, she thinks, is no coincidence. These people who have captured them—who were so very angry to find Jemma, Willis, and Flores collecting corpses in the jungle—must be using the macaques as test subjects.

Presumably, they intend to use whatever they’re testing for nefarious purposes, but that’s all Jemma has been able to conclude. It would be nice if Jemma, Flores, or Willis could speak Khmer (or if any of their captors could and/or were _willing_ to speak English), but as they don’t, she has nothing more to work with.

Her wrist hurts rather a lot. She’s been trying not to think about it.

(Almost as much as she’s been trying not to consider the obvious answer to the question of why these people are keeping them alive.)

 

+++

 

Grant’s never in his life been so grateful for his reputation. The fact that everyone knows Agent Ward is “bad at people” means he can get away with a lot—offending Hopkins, insulting Amrani, and reading Caraway the riot act for going into Cambodia without approval, thereby forcing them to run this rescue mission under the radar so as not to attract the Cambodian government’s attention—and have it dismissed as being socially hopeless.

It doesn’t mean it annoys them any less (or is any less likely to end in an official reprimand for disrespecting a superior officer), but it _does_ mean they don’t look any closer at his behavior.

None of them realize that he’s genuinely struggling with the urge to murder them all.

Morons.

 

+++

 

They’ve each been taken from the cell several times—twice to shower (with an audience; not an experience Jemma _ever_ wants to repeat, for all that she’s already been forced to), thrice for half-hearted medical treatment (Flores’ head wound really did require it, and Jemma’s wrist needed to be rewrapped after both showers), and once a day for food. They’re always brought out one at a time and never harmed beyond a bit of shoving around.

Their captors are going to some effort to keep them in reasonably decent condition. It’s concerning.

More concerning is their twelfth day of captivity, because Willis is taken from their cell and returns twenty minutes later, pale and shaky and gripping his upper arm.

Jemma’s stomach drops right to her toes. He doesn’t even need to say anything.

He says it anyway. “They injected me with something.”

Yes. She was afraid of that.

Flores crosses herself and says, bleakly, “We’re fucked.”

Jemma tries to think of something to say—something encouraging or optimistic or literally _anything_ other than “you’re probably right”—and fails.

Fortunately, the strained silence into which her hopeful comment _should_ be spoken (if only she could think of one) is broken almost as soon as it begins.

 _Un_ fortunately, it’s broken by the sound of their cell door swinging open again so that one of their captors can point at Jemma.

“Oh, no,” she says, rather more faintly than she means to.

The man makes a forceful gesture. Jemma, mind caught on dead monkeys and experimental drugs and _I don’t want to be a test subject_ , doesn’t move.

“Move now, or I move you,” he threatens, in perfect English.

In any other circumstances, Jemma might refuse to move out of pure irritation that this man has let them try for _twelve days_ to communicate through sign language, pointing, and—at one giddy, desperate hour—interpretive dance when he apparently speaks English just fine.

As it is, terror swamps her at the revelation, because if he speaks English, that means he’s understood each and every one of the times they’ve told him that they’re SHIELD agents.

He can’t—these people as a whole can’t—possibly mean to let them go. Not knowing they’re SHIELD agents. Not knowing they’re SHIELD agents who have seen enough of their operation to cause them trouble in the future. Not knowing that there are _severe_ consequences for holding SHIELD agents prisoner.

They’re here solely as test subjects and, whatever the results of the tests…they won’t be leaving here alive. Their captors can’t afford to allow it.

This particular captor has grown impatient.

“That’s it,” he says, and takes two steps into the cell.

His third step lands with a deafening, unexpected _crack_ ; Jemma jumps and bites her tongue at the agony that sears through her wrist with the sudden movement, and between the pain and the resulting spots she has to blink away, it takes her several seconds to realize what’s happened.

Once she does, all she can think to say is, “Oh, thank god.”

Ward steps over their captor (he’s now face-down on the floor and soon to be very dead, judging by the rate at which blood is spreading out beneath him) and pins her with a frown.

“I can’t take my eyes off you for five minutes,” he sighs.

“You’re one to talk,” she retorts automatically—and then processes exactly what she’s just referenced and scrambles to her feet. “What are you _doing_ here?! You were _shot_ a month ago, you shouldn’t be in the field—”

“ _I_ shouldn’t be in the field?”

“—let me see your shoulder,” she orders. “You’ve made it worse, I just know you have.”

“You are ridiculous,” he says flatly and, the moment she’s in range, yanks her into his arms. “Are you hurt?”

“Um.” Ward is hugging her. Ward _never_ hugs her. Ward never hugs _anyone_. And yet he’s hugging her. “I—I think my wrist is broken. And I have a wound on my back that may be infected.”

He starts to pull away, but Jemma, deciding that she _deserves_ a hug after twelve days in captivity, clings to him with all her might. It’s not nearly enough to hold him if he truly wants away, but he must not; with a little sigh, he tightens his hold on her and rests his chin on her head.

Cuddling up to a man in a tac vest isn’t the most comfortable of experiences (her cheek is resting directly over a pocket, and whatever is inside of it is digging awfully into her skin), but it’s certainly _comforting_. With Ward here, she knows she’s safe.

For the first time since she, Flores, and Willis were surrounded by shouting, gun-wielding criminals, she can relax.

After a long moment, during which Jemma tries her absolute hardest not to cry, Ward twitches a little and, apropos of nothing, says, “Yeah. East side. Third cell.”

She assumes it’s directed to someone on the other side of a comm, and is proven right in short order by Agent Amrani’s arrival.

“Huh,” she says, in a tone that suggests Ward has been his typically unfriendly self in Jemma’s absence. “You hug? I would not have guessed that.”

“Fuck off,” Ward says, almost casually. “I’ve got my scientist; maybe you should worry about yours.”

More than a little ashamed that she all but forgot Flores and Willis at the sight of Ward, Jemma cranes her neck to examine them herself. Willis looks no worse for the wear— _yet_ —but she really should see about getting a sample of whatever he was injected with and working up a counteragent. This is no time to be clinging to Ward like some—some damsel out of a romance novel.

She’s not a damsel. She is a SHIELD agent who was captured in the field, and her duty doesn’t end when captivity does any more than it did when captivity _started_. So, with a deep breath, she forces herself to let go of Ward and cross the cell to more closely inspect Willis.

“How are you feeling?” she asks. “Any symptoms?”

“Dizzy,” he grits out. “Nauseous.”

“Heartbeat’s steady,” reports Flores, who has two fingers laid carefully over Willis’ wrist. “That seems like a good sign.”

“Maybe,” Jemma says unhappily. If only they had more data…all they know about this drug is that it’s killed at least _some_ of the test monkeys.

(Assuming, of course, that Willis was injected with the same compound as the monkeys, and that this isn’t some second, even _less_ known substance.)

There’s no telling what it was meant to do to the macaques, let alone what it might do to a human being.

“They’ve been doing experiments,” Flores points out. “There must be a lab around here somewhere, right?”

Jemma twists to look at Ward; she’s sure he cleared the building before coming to find them.

“Yeah, we passed one on the way in,” he confirms.

Amrani shakes her head. “There’s a SHIELD base in—”

“There’s no time,” Jemma says. “We have no idea what sort of timetable we’re working on. Come on, Willis, up you get.”

 

+++

 

After several hours of science, four separate tries at getting Simmons to sit down long enough to have her back looked at, and a deeply unsettling “It probably won’t make things worse,” Willis gets dosed with a maybe-cure to the drug he was _probably_ given before the rescue team arrived.

“You’re kind of terrifying,” Grant informs Simmons, and she beams in honest pleasure.

“Thank you, Ward!”

She looks like she’s thinking about hugging him again, so naturally Amrani decides it’s the perfect time to pick up a long-abandoned thread of conversation.

“I’m just saying,” she says, “punching superior officers one minute, hugging scientists the next—you’ve got depth, Ward.”

“Punch—Ward!” Simmons gasps. “Did you _hit_ Agent Caraway?”

Grant shrugs. “He deserved it.”

He’s pretty sure he won’t get in any trouble for it. They might _start_ court martial proceedings, but once Coulson hears the whole story—namely, the part where Caraway let Simmons go wandering in the jungle alone and then worried more about his career than the scientists he _lost_ —the whole thing’ll get swept under the rug. At most, he’s looking at another course in anger management.

Which isn’t to say SHIELD’s anger management course isn’t a hell of a punishment, but…Simmons is worth it.

“I don’t care,” she says, scowling up at him. He’ll never tell her how adorable that angry face is; way too much chance she’d stop making it. “You can’t just go around _punching superior officers_!”

“You’re lucky I don’t punch _you_ ,” he frowns back.

Simmons just laughs—she knows it’s an empty threat; he’d never hurt her—but Amrani bristles like she thinks he’s serious. And while he could just tell her it was a joke…well, Caraway might’ve been the one to decide that it was fine for three scientists to go wandering the jungle alone, but Amrani actually _listened_. He’s in no hurry to make nice with her. Or with her superior officer. Or with the two scientists who _led Simmons into the jungle without backup_.

All things considered, it’s probably for the best that the clean-up crew from the base in Phnom Penh shows up right about then.

 

+++

 

Leaving the facility in which she’s been imprisoned isn’t the end of the whole affair, of course. Far from it.

Jemma gets a (thankfully very private) shower before reporting to the Phnom Penh field office’s infirmary for a (not at all private; Ward spends the whole time prowling the edges of the room like he expects an invasion) physical, after which she’s forced to accept a cast for her broken wrist and twelve stitches for the (as expected, infected) cut on her back.

Then it’s a nice warm meal, hours and hours of debriefing, and a somewhat desperate call to Coulson before finally— _finally_ —the base commander decides that Jemma and Ward can return to the Hub for further debrief, though Agent Caraway’s team will be remaining in Cambodia until the matter of crossing the border without permission is settled.

All told, there’s a full twenty hours between their arrival at and departure from the field office. By the time she takes her seat on their Hub-bound Quinjet, Jemma is mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausted. She can’t even muster up the energy to buckle her seatbelt.

“Here,” Ward says softly, “I got it.”

Were he any less thorough in strapping her in, she’d slump right over into his lap. As it is, the closest she can get is resting her head against his shoulder.

“Thank you,” she murmurs. She doesn’t mean to close her eyes, but somehow they end up shut anyway, and she can’t find it in herself to open them again. “For that and for saving us.”

“Any time.” Ward squeezes her thigh. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”

She owes him much more effusive thanks, but she just can’t…can’t anything.

“I’m very tired,” she offers in helpless explanation.

“I know,” Ward says, and—it could just be her imagination, but she thinks he really does—kisses the top of her head. “You can sleep, sweetheart. It’s fine.”

Her heart stutters in her chest. Did he just call her—?

But after hour upon hour upon _day_ of fighting it, exhaustion has won out. Sleep drags her under before she can question him.

(But perhaps this—her head on his shoulder, his hand on her thigh, and a last-minute rescue operation in _Cambodia_ , of all places—and he punched a superior officer for her!—answers the question for her anyway.)


End file.
